Fakrul alam biography of william

The writer, right, with his teacher

These days people ask me about him and I tell them, "What should I say?" I repeat his words, "What should I say?"  Well, I find myself recalling the exact words he used often when we saw him first as our lecturer in first year honours. He was one of those promising lecturers during that period --- Syed Manzoorul Islam, Fakrul Alam, Kaiser Haq, Niaz Zaman, Nizamul Haque, Syed Anwarul Haque, Suraiya Khanum, Sadrul Amin...
While thinking of the right thing to say his common expression was – "What should I say?" And it slowed down the flow and tempo of his lecture and it used to distract our rapt attention somewhat.
In our first year honours class in the English Department of Dacca (the old spelling comes with nostalgia!)  University, he enlightened us on the late 18th century and early 19th century English poet William Blake, who was also famous as a painter and engraver. His Songs of Innocence and Experience was most familiar to us and its catchy expression was so handy that even during our honours final exam, while returning from the exam hall, we ( Rafique, former national cricketer and selector , Ilahi Dad Khan, in Food Directorate, Mamun  in Canada and I ) used to greatly enjoy smoking cigarettes as a relief ( no less than tragic relief!)  and chanting Blake –
Little Lamb I'll tell thee!
He is called by thy name,
For he calls himself a Lamb:
He is meek & he is mild,
He became a little child:
I a child & thou a lamb,
We are called by his name.
Little Lamb God bless thee.
In second year honours, Ashraf sir was our tutorial teacher. In our group the other classmates were the talented television actress Mita Chowdhury, Yasmeen and June. I still remember vividly the remark he wrote - 'Cogently written'- as he gave me an A in one tutorial assignment. Since then I have fancied the word cogently very much and have used it aptly!
One day in his class he was drawing an analogy among

The Essential Tagore is the largest collection of Rabindranath Tagore's works available in English. It was published by Harvard University Press in the United States and Visva-Bharati University in India to mark the 150th anniversary of Tagore's birth.Fakrul Alam and Radha Chakrabarthy edited the anthology. Among the notable contributors who translated Tagore's works for this anthology are Amitav Ghosh, Amit Chaudhuri, Sunetra Gupta, Syed Manzoorul Islam, and Kaiser Haq.Martha Nussbaum, a philosopher, writer and critic proposed the book as the 'Book of the Year' in the New Statesman published on November 21, 2011.

The anthology is around eight hundred pages long, divided into ten sections, each devoted to a different facet of Tagore's achievement. In this anthology, the editors endeavored to represent his extraordinary achievements in ten genres: poetry, songs, autobiographical works, letters, travel writings, prose, novels, short stories, humorous pieces, and plays. Most of the translations were done in modern contemporary English. Besides the new translations, it includes a sampling of works originally composed in English, Tagore's translations of his own works.

Critical reception

Initial reviews for the Essential Tagore were almost all positive. Immediately after the publication, it received positive reviews worldwide. Barry Hill in the Australian welcomed the publication as "a wonderful job" and "almost all gold". Praising the editors and translators, Amartya Sen exclaimed that though the excellence of Tagore's work is difficult to preserve in translation, they did a splendid

By Fakrul Alam

The very last words my mother had said to me constituted the question, “What is your name?” We were in the VIP lounge of Dhaka airport and she had just been wheeled in from an aircraft with one of my sisters. Another sister and I had gathered there to receive her, perhaps knowing as well as her, that she was close to dying. And yet she had managed a smile as she said to me, “What is your name?”

The words, indeed, amounted to a kind of game she would play with me whenever I would meet her at my sister’s house in Dhaka. It was what we call a rhetorical question since she most certainly did not have to be told what my name was. It was her way of reminding me that while I might be professor of English at the University of Dhaka, I — Dr. Alam, as she would also sometimes teasingly call me — should never forget that I had learned English from her, sometimes literally at her feet as she did housework, and on other occasions, when she had done the day’s work, at the table where all of us siblings would gather to study once we were old enough to do so.

On International Women’s Day, I would like to pay a tribute to my mother, her fierce belief in the importance of education, especially women’s education, and the rights of women to study and work and have parity in every sphere with men.

My mother was an outstanding student. Recorded as well as oral family narratives enable me to reconstruct her brilliant performance as a student as well as her aborted student life and its consequences. From one of my aunts’ contributions to the 100th anniversary commemorative volume of Feni Government Girls School, I am reminded that both in Class Four and Six she had made it to the All Bengal Merit List and had been awarded scholarships for her achievement.

From an uncle’s autobiographical narrative, I have an explanation of why she had to stop studying when she was in Class Eight. The only Muslim girl studying in a very conservative town, she had become an